Posts Tagged ‘TechTalk’

Just a quick post to mention I had a chance to quickly shoot a handful of mostly Leica lenses on the M9 from the same vantage point and in similar weather conditions as a basic comparison against the “infinity” images from the Sony a7 and rangefinder lenses test.

Of course, because these were done at a different time, they’re not the exact same framing (sorry about the tilted horizon) or visual aesthetic due to differences in light and weather. That said, the basic technical considerations of sharpness and edge detail rendition can be observed and compared. The M9 images were captured as DNG files and converted in Lightroom 4.4 with generally the basic settings. No additional noise reduction, CA correction or lens profile correction was applied. The default sharpening setting was left as is. White balance was tweaked and the tone curve was adjusted to open up the darker mid and shadow tones somewhat to better reveal image sharpness. Therefore these don’t have the overall heavy look seen in the A7 images.

Maybe, given time, when I upgrade to Lightroom 5, I’ll reprocess the A7 RAW files to see how much of an improvement there is over the in-camera Jpegs.

Here are some basic thoughts about the similarities and differences of these lenses on both cameras…

The most similar results for a given lens on each camera are with the CV12 and 90 Summarit. All of the other lenses generate considerably better edge zone detail on the M9. Even the 21 Lux, that seems to be pretty good on the A7, and certainly would be usable and most aperture settings, is visibly better on the M9. The 21 SEM is sharp across the frame wide open, whereas it’s not on the A7. While the 28 Cron needs a couple stops to improve the edges on the M9, it’s not blatantly soft (along the edges) shot wide open. The 50 Lux ASPH also exhibits better edge performance, which makes its mid zone sharpness dip, especially around f/2.8, all that much more obvious.

Still hoping to get my hands on an a7R and running a test with the full set of lenses I did with the a7…